Class Size Effects in Active Learning Physics Courses Documents

Main Document

With the growth of the University of California, Davis, we have been forced to seek more space for our active learning based lower-division discussion/laboratories. Our new room holds twice as many students (48) as our existing laboratories. Since we still use the smaller rooms, students taking the one-year physics sequence have a chance to experience both the larger classroom environment and the smaller one. We took advantage of this situation to study the effect of class size on students and instructors in active learning physics courses. In this paper we report on the initial results of our study of these changes and offer some insight into the differences between larger and smaller active learning settings in physics.